Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - Spits & Hurri's to 25,000 + feet in RL?

I don't have much experience in Spits and Hurries, but i've had extensive testing done in the Blenheim of previous versions which was totally unforgiving in terms of CEM, to the point the current version Blenheim is a breeze for me to fly despite its air-cooled engines.

My experience tells me we tend to focus too much on publicised figures and not how they are achieved.

What i mean is, all these graphs tell me how a Spit climbs. They don't tell me a thing about what it entails to get that performance.

I'm lucky in the regard that i had extensive CEM training on a friend's PC running certain FSX add-ons. I could pretty much eyeball engine behaviour in CoD right from the release version and as we get corrected CEM/FM with patches it becomes all the more easier for me.
In some aspects CoD is more forgiving than the FSX add-ons i've flown and in some it's less forgiving. But overall, the practice really payed off.

What i would suggest to do is forget about the graphs for a while and learn to juggle the different engine parameters. When you are comfortable with it (and trust me, it's not if, it's when...you can learn it in an evening flying some free flight missions in QMB and trying to "ride the edge" of the CEM envelope), you'll see that the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place quite nicely.

You can also go to the A2A simulations website and download one of the manuals for their accusim aircraft. It doesn't matter which one, because they all have a preface on internal combustion engines that explains quite a bit.

Finally, one of the most important tips for efficient climbing is the angle of climb. There are aircraft in the sim where you have to actually level off, trim nose down and build some speed first before climbing and the reason is very simple: higher airspeed gives you more lift potential (hence better climb) but it also gives you more airflow over your radiators.

I've found many times that it's better to level off and build speed, trimming out the climb tendency, until i reach a good, comfortable speed. Then the speed increases further and instead of trimming it out completely, i just trim slightly to keep the vertical speed indicator where i want it.

What i'm trying to say is, you could take the same amount of time reaching 10k feet in both cases, but one could be a full power steep climb that overheats your engine, the other a rated power climb at a shallower angle that keeps everything running nice and cool.

Try it out and get used to it, then you'll see things improving considerably. I'm not much of an ace online, but i never have engine damage unless it's because of enemy action or i intentionally break it to test things out. First few days with the sim that was all i ever did, just taking one aircraft at a time on the free flight quick missions and testing its engine operation and different profiles for climb, cruise and combat power.

Trust me, it really pays off and the main reason is that it applies to all aircraft. Even if the parameters are different for each one, the "feel" of doing things and the main principles are the same.

For example, i tried the G.50 yesterday for the first time in months and while it's a bit of a handful to manage initially, during the course of a 30 minute flight i was comfortable enough keeping the engine running smooth as silk, all the way up to 3.5km and then through a high speed dive down to the circuit, approach and landing.
Then i spawned into a low alt dogfight quick mission against some AI Gladiators, i set pitch and rads once and didn't touch them for the rest of the mission. The thing run brilliantly the whole time.

Cheers ;)